Brian Stableford - An Oasis of Horror

7/27/2019 Brian Stableford - An Oasis of Horror

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Brian Stableford

An Oasis of Horror

a short story



Amer savoir, celui qu’on tire du voyage!

Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd’hui,

Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir image:

Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui!

Charles Baudelaire, « Le voyage ».

1.Spleen de Paris: 30 June 1845

“Existence,” said Charles Baudelaire to his father’s ghost, “moves in the

midst of a multifarious epidemic in which no one is ever quite content

with the disease that has fallen to his lot. The metaphorical

consumptive contemplates with peevish frustration those afflicted with

St. Anthony’s fire; the spiritual leper would prefer the particular

ruination of lupus; those whose souls bear the scars of smallpox would

rather entertain the demon of cholera....no, it won’t do, with it? Too

obvious. We’re all sick—so what? To yearn to be sick in a different way

is as good a definition of futile hope as any, but it can’t explain....”

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Waiting for a reply from his absent father, present only in feeble spirit,

would also have been as good a definition of futile hope as any, but that

wasn’t why he trailed off. He had conceived a new beginning.

“It is unnecessary to envy the dead body its oblivion,” he said, “for

annihilation is within the grasp of any man, but to envy the dead soulits transcendence of life is another matter. The objective of one who is

unhappy with life is not to cease to be, but rather to discover a realm in

which being is not so direly bound by discomfiting circumstance—which

is to say, a realm in which the pattern of discomfiting circumstance is

not so stifling in its arid monotony. No—it pains me to admit it, but it

may be true that there are points at which all communication fails,

where silence is preferable to verbal expression because the act speaks

for itself, more eloquently than any steel nib....”

He set down his pen, dissatisfied. He had, in any case, already takencare of the formal necessities; he had written his will and placed it in an

envelope, with a covering letter, addressed to his lawyer, Ancelle. He had

bequeathed all his possessions to his saviour, Jeanne Duval, and had

asked the lawyer to watch over her and guide her, just as he would have

watched over and guided him, in accordance with the order of

guardianship for which his mother had applied to the Tribunal in the

previous September. He had asked Ancelle to remember him to Jeanne

as a hideous example—a dire warning of the extremes to which a

disorderly life might go. That was enough; his dead father needed nosuicide note to understand what Charles was doing and wand nothing

could be said that would enlighten Madame Aupick, let alone the

general. His mother and stepfather had long grown used to their

particular sicknesses, and did not understand the politics of resistance.

When his mother had gone to the Tribunal to have Ancelle appointed as

his legal guardian, it was in the genuine belief that she was acting in

his best interests, in a spirit of valiant palliation.

Charles picked up the dagger in the same hand that had set down the

pen, and placed the point to his left breast, feeling for a gap between theribs.

He did not expect to discover what it felt like to die. He expected to feel a

sudden shock of pain, in which his consciousness would sooner or later

dissolve—sooner, if his hand were steady and the blade punctured his

heart at the first stroke; later if he faltered, and was forced to move the

blade from side to side, groping for fatality.

Jeanne had told him that he need have no fear of death, because she

had favoured him with a special kiss that would deliver him to vampire

undeath, but he had not believed it when she said it and he did not

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believe it now. He did not expect to be clawing his way out of the tomb

on the day after his burial. Jeanne Duval was certainly a lamia—a

serpent in human form, a temptress asp—but Charles did not believe

that her sting was more powerful than that of death.

He took a deep breath, and pressed the dagger home.

His hand was not steady, and he had to grope for fatality, cursing

himself the while because his heart was so unexpectedly hard to find.

Then he found it, and the felt point strike like a cobra’s fang, opening

the ventricle to let out the pulsing blood.

He waited to die. And waited. In the end, the pain faded away, but

consciousness did not. He never lost his grip on consciousness for an

instant, and never would again.

“Has heaven rejected me, then?” He asked his father, eventually, “or is itsimply that my blood is no longer my own, and will not flow to my

bidding.”

He checked his pulse, and could not find one. He breathed on a mirror,

and it did not fog—although his reflection was still there, as dull and

sickly as ever, wearing a rictus snarl. His heart had evidently stopped;

his lungs no longer sucked in air; he had left life behind—but not for

death. Jeanne had told him the truth.

Another man might have picked up his hat and rushed to see his

sometime mistress, in order to begin his education in the politics and

practices of undeath, but Charles did not. Jeanne was an actress, of

sorts, but she was not a poet. She knew how to exist as she existed, but

Charles did not think for a moment that she had the slightest idea what

possibilities there might be in undeath.

“Perhaps there have been undead poets before,” he said, no longer to his

father but more straightforwardly to himself, “and perhaps there are

some still active, in the New World if not in the old—but that does not

matter. They could no more teach me what I need to learn than Jeanne

Duval. It is 1845, and wisdom is being rewritten with every day that

passes. It is not the ancient alchemy of undeath that I need to discover

but the new chemistry: the new atomism. It is not a mentor that I need

but a method of investigation; I am the Lavoisier of vampirism,

appointed by fate to discover its oxygen. I am the sick man who has

finally found the disease that will fulfil me. I cannot ask, and do not

want, to be happy, but I have found me sublimity, my astonishment, my

horror. Henceforth, I am the poet of undeath—and could never have

wished for any other fate, had I ever believed that this one might be

achievable.”

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He did take up his hat, then. Before he closed the door behind him he

looked around his room with new eyes, no longer seeing its shabbiness,

its unworthiness, its vile mundanity. It was no longer a manger fit for

beasts but a cradle fit for a messiah. He no longer had the slightest

desire to leave it behind forever.“I need to look at the world,” He said, to his impatient writing-desk, “but

I shall return—and in time, I shall know how to vent my spleen!”

2.Les métamorphoses du vampire: 1845-1848

It was not that simple, nor that easy. He never missed the beating of his

heart, or the necessity to draw breath, and learned to feign the latter

easily enough. He would not have missed the necessity to eat and drink,

either, had he been relieved of them, but he was not. The undead, he

discovered, hungered and thirsted for more than blood. Indeed, the first

of many inherited misconceptions he had to put aside was the notion

that the undead were entirely dependent for their sustenance on human

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blood. Human blood tasted sweet, to be sure, but it was an indulgence

—perhaps a fetish—rather than an appetite. To sustain himself, he

learned by trial and error, his only absolute requirements were red meat

and water—in which, he presumed, all the raw materials of blood were

conserved. What he did miss, however, was sleep. His sleep, as a living man, had

long been so overfull of dreams as never to give him a moment’s respite,

but he had never grasped the significance of that fact until sleep was

denied to him. He could feign sleep as easily as he could feign

breathing, but he could not actually lose consciousness. He could

dream, but he could no longer cage his dreams, carefully placing them

beyond the bounds of conscious life. His dreams were free now, and

would have to be tamed—if he did intend to tame them, and if it were

possible to tame them—in a different manner. That, he knew, would take time.

For a while, he considered the possibility of becoming an apostle of

undeath, openly acknowledging his condition and advertising its merits.

From time to time he planned essays on the subject, but never took the

risk of writing one down, let alone attempting to publish one.

“The transition to undeath is not pleasant,” he told his imagined

audience, “but nor is it surprising. It is more like waking up than going

to sleep; the sensation seems familiar. That may seem odd to you, butone sometimes requires a spur to bring out the fullness of what one has

always known. Perhaps, when you leave life behind, you will find death

more familiar than you had anticipated. You might think of death as a

moment that cannot be experienced twice, but it is entirely possible

that you will one day realise—cursing yourself for not having realised it

before—that death is always with us, an inevitable companion of life. We

begin to die before we are born, and even as we are conceived we carry

forward a legacy of death that extends throughout the history of

creation. Death is original sin, and we live with it constantly. The

embryo in the womb is sculpted by death, as an artist chips a statue

free from inchoate stone. The elements of the growing body are

ceaselessly replaced; every aspect of our form has been remade a dozen

times before we achieve maturity. We know death intimately, but it is

the dullest sickness of all, the ultimate uniformity. It is a rare victim

who learns the desire to be rid of it, and a rarer one who finds the

means, but it can be done. Only follow me, and I shall show you the

way. I am the resurrection and the undeath, the way to salvation.”

He could not do it, not because he would have been staked through the

heart, burned at the stake, beheaded or crucified merely for making the

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suggestion, but because it was essentially blasphemous. He was, after

all, an incorrigible Catholic.

In that respect, if not in any other, he learned to do as other vampires

did; he feigned humility as he feigned life; he pretended to be a man. He

took care to appear to breathe as a man breathed, and he took care toappear to write as a man wrote. As Jeanne Duval was an actress,

whether she was on stage at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Antoine or in

his bed, so Charles became an actor, not merely in the salons he

frequented and the Café Brasserie, but in the privacy of his room and

his writing-desk. He was undead, but he played the part of a living man

addressing other living men.

He stuck to his resolution of never seeking help from Jeanne—although

she understood the change in his condition from the first moment she

saw him undead—but he did begin to understand her a little better thanhe had before. He came to understand the peculiarity of her whoredom

—why she did not like to accept the gifts that pleased other whores,

including money; why she was reluctant to accept food or wine in

restaurants; and why she was so proud of her seemingly meagre needs.

He never tried to discover her real name, age or place of origin, not so

much because he was not curious or because he suspected that she

had long since forgotten all those details, but because he preferred to

exercise his imagination on such questions. He wanted to think of her

as a representative of some primal African race, ancestral to allhumankind: an infertile Eve, who lived in civilization but was not part of

it. In his own mind, he reconstructed the myth of Eden, preferring a

version in which Adam abandoned his second wife as he had

abandoned his first, to be given another of the same name on which to

father Cain, while the one he left in Eden—Genesis being explicit in the

statement that he was expelled alone—had entered into a more intimate

relationship with the serpent, and had found a better fate than death in

the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Charles preserved that fantasy, jealously, even after discovering,somewhat to his dismay, that undeath had not rendered him immune to

aging, disease or death. He wanted to believe, even then, that Jeanne

was different, and that her undeath really was undying. His friends,

who had ever been able to comprehend his interest in her, could not

comprehend either why he maintained his relationship with her even

though she was no longer his mistress.

“She is beautiful in her fashion,” Banville told him, after encountering

her in his presence in January 1848, “but beyond her relentless

irritability she is remote and indifferent. There is no feeling in her forother human beings, no reward for attention paid to her. She might

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have amused you once, but I cannot understand your continued

fascination.”

Nadar, who was also present, concurred. “She’s seductive, but

insubstantial. She’s long accustomed and inured to the fact that the

men she fascinates move on. She understands that there is no future inany of her dalliances, and expects no more than desertion. In this

instance, at least, you should indulge her. You’d do far better to let her

alone, now that she’s of no further use to you in bed.”

“There is a sense in which she is my only true companion,” Charles told

them, “and always will be. There may be others like me, but I do not

intend to seek them out; she is different, because she knew me before,

and made me what I am.”

“I know that you can never hear two men agree without wanting to

argue the opposite case,” Banville pressed him, “but I can see that there

is more to your interest in Jeanne than a simple desire for dissent. Alas,

your explanations make no sense.”

“I can see the goddess in her,” Charles told them. “I can see the

sublimity of her conduct as well as the beauty in her face. There is

always an element of horror in sublimity, as there is always an element

of pain in beauty, but it only serves to sharpen the sensation for the

connoisseur. Art comes from the Devil as well as from God, Theo, and

the true artist must love and fear both virtue and its opposite.”“Now that is sheer perversity,” Nadar opined.

Charles made no attempt to deny it. “When I call Jeanne my dark

Venus,” he said, instead, “I do not mean by that that I ever worshipped

her, or ever desired to do so—but I always knew that there was

something in her more or less than human. There is nothing that she

can teach me about what I desire to become, but that does not alter

what she is.”

He said no more, because he was committed to playing the part of a

living man, even with such friends as Banville and Nadar, let alone

Murger and the Brasserie crowd.

Charles continued to see Jeanne, not to interrogate her or to worship

her, let alone to sleep with her, but to study her as a specimen of his

own kind and to imagine her as the better Eve. There was, however, one

thing that did intrigue him, almost to the point of asking her a question

—one matter relative to which the products of his imagination seemed

vaguely imperfect.

Obviously, she did not kiss all her lovers in the way that she had kissedhim. Very few of those she took to her bed, he had to suppose, had ever

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seen her metamorphosis or calculated its significance. For the majority,

she remained forever flesh, although she presumably drank their infant

blood from its marrowbone cradle as thirstily as she had drunk his. He

did not know whether it was her generosity that granted him the sight

of her true self, or whether there had been some special capacity forsight in him. She had seen that he had seen and had known that he

had known—and had seen and known, too, that when he saw and knew

her as a snake and as a skeleton, he did not recoil, being entirely

content with the confirmation of his fascination—but that in itself did

not explain why she had kissed him in the serpentine fashion that had

allowed him to survive the dagger’s penetration of his heart.

Sometimes, he wondered whether she had actually intended it at all, or

whether she was as helpless to determine the inheritance of her legacy

as she was to determine so much else in her life.Either way, he did not want to learn the secret of the kiss from her,

because he had no intention of communicating it to any of his own

lovers.

3.L’invitation au voyage: 1848-1855

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As Charles watched the barricade being constructed from his window,

on the morning of the 15th, his first thought was: This is nothing to do

with me. Mine is only a pretence of life, a mere masquerade. Then the

National Guardsmen came, and tried to tear down the incomplete

barricade. He saw one of the defenders run through with a bayonet—aman whose blood was all too ready to flow and flood, and whose flesh

was entirely unresistant to the shock of fatality—and he went

downstairs.

He took his place at the barricade, consenting to be armed with a rifle

that had not been fired since July 1830, because he had something to

defend, not on his own behalf, but on behalf of his fellow men, to whom

injustice had been done. When he heard from Nadar that the rumour

had been put about the Brasserie that he had donned a workman’s

blouse and run from barricade to barricade trying to raise a mob toassassinate General Aupick he was momentarily annoyed, but then

consented to laugh, and even to wonder why he had not thought of

doing exactly that. He left the barricade, though, when he concluded

that it was doing more harm than good to those whose interests he

desired to represent.

“You did the right thing,” Banville told him, “not simply because the

revolution has soured, as revolutions inevitably do, but because ours is

a different and more effective path of rebellion.”

“Not if it leads to your Parnassus or Gautier’s art pour l’art,” Charles

told him, risking a quarrel. “I am pioneering a different way.”

“By imagining yourself in love with my mistress?” Banville retorted,

although Charles knew that he was far more intent on defending the

New Parnassus than Marie Daubrun. “I wish now that I had never

counselled you to abandon Jeanne Duval.”

“All my life,” Charles told him, pointing to the window so that his friend

would know that he was referring to the barricade rather than Marie, “I

have sought oases of horror in the vast desert of ennui, but when civilorder disintegrates and human society is reduced to chaos there is no

relief in horror—quite the opposite, in fact. The horror of the sublime

requires a very different mise-en-scène. I require nothing of your

mistress that need occasion your jealousy. She is a merely an example,

an actress cast in a role; I view her as a writer, not as a seducer.”

“Sometimes,” Banville told him, “I think the Brasserie rabble might be

right, and that you might be going mad.”

Sometimes, as he dreamed while he was wide awake, Charles thought

that might be possible, and he was not so foolish as to believe that

undeath was any insulation against the dangers of madness. He had

10



been undead long enough, by the Year of Revolutions, to know how

imperfect its insulation was, even against the diseases of the living.

The repression that followed the revolution did not please him any more

than the monster the revolution had become, and such order as it

restored seemed to him to have been bought at a terrible price. He hadhad to leave Paris behind to go to Dijon; he had work to do, not merely

for the support of his remaining appetites, but in pursuit of the only

utility left to him. Alas, he was ill, and found it as difficult to work, even

in more pleasant circumstances, as he had often found it while he was

alive.

“Those who are brought back reluctant from the tomb,” he said, to the

absent Jeanne, “rudely wrenched from the oblivion they would have

preferred, are doubtless conformists in undeath as they were in life.

Small wonder that they so often become angry and wretched, when theydiscover that they have no more won immunity from pain and terror

than they have won immunity from original sin. Legend doubtless

speaks the truth when it portrays vampires pursuing what ends they

may still find, by stake or fire or the guillotine, shunning daylight in the

meantime as if it were the unquenching fire of hell.”

Charles had never been overfond of daylight before he left life behind,

but he found it just as endurable afterwards as he had before, even in

Dijon, where the sun shone far more fiercely than in smoke-cloaked

Paris. He did not seek it out, but nor did he live in fear of it. He

dedicated himself to his learning, and his work, in spite of his fevers

and his aches, and in spite of the deliria that disturbed his waking

dreams.

He knew that the delirium was not caused by the venom that Jeanne

Duval’s vampire kiss had injected into his flesh and his soul, but he

suspected that she might have communicated another poison to him as

well: the poison of the pox. He did not blame her for that any more than

he blamed her for the other—indeed, he blamed her less, for he had

been warned of that sort of danger attendant on sleeping with whores.

“A voyage to Cythera must be taken at the pace granted by the wind,” he

told his father’s ghost, “and whether there are gallows-trees standing on

the shore or not, dream-vision will provide them. Dreams are essentially

morbid as well as wayward, although they can be enlivened as well as

tamed by rhyme and metre, shaped for the sympathy as well as the

comprehension of the ear. I shall not mind their morbidity, any more

than I mind their waywardness, because I know that it merely the dark

component of their oxymoronic mask. I shall welcome them, for what

they make of me. As my living body was once sculpted by disease and

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death, so my undying mind shall be etched by disease and dreams. I am

content.”

Even so, the first thing he did on his return to Paris was to visit Jeanne

Duval. He did not question her directly, but he did go fishing for

enlightenment “Undeath has spared me once,” he told her, “but I do not believe that it can spare me forever. The interval it has purchased might

be thirty years or it might be a dozen, but the pox is within me, and is

consuming me still. You and I shall not be companions for all eternity.”

“I never expected that,” she told him. “The pox won’t kill you, if you

don’t yield to it, but I don’t think you have the capacity to resist. I never

did.”

Charles told himself that she could not know that, but he knew that she

could and did. There were many things that she probably did not know

—including her given name and how old she was—but she did know

how to live with the pox inside her. She knew how to carry the disease

without injury to herself, and she knew how to recognise those who

could not.

There was no alternative for Charles but race against time: to work, in

spite of his deliria. He had worked even before committing suicide, but

not as he worked thereafter. That was partly because the undead had to

sustain themselves just as the living did, whether they pretended to

breathe or not and he could not have lived on the pittance doled out tohim by Ancelle even if he had been prepared to abandon to the ideals of

dandyism, but it was mainly because he had a far greater sense of

vocation. He was, after all, the Lavoisier of undeath. As soon as he had

become a vampire he had announced the imminent publication of his

book of verses in 1845, and he had continued to advertise it ever since.

It had begun its imaginative existence as Les lesbiennes, had been

transmuted into Les Limbes, and was now Les fleurs du mal, growing

all the while in its actual substance as he wrote poem after poem. In the

meantime, he supported himself by publishing prose, commemorating

the life he might have lived had he not left life behind in La Fanfarlo and

encouraging his fellow artists as best he could in my essays on the

Salons and other ephemerae.

By the time he had been ten years a vampire, Charles had left far

behind him all the misconceptions regarding undeath that he learned

on the stage of the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin and the pages of romans

feuilletons. When the revolution of 1848 had given way to Louis

Napoléon’s coup d’état, and the consequent exile of Victor Hugo,

Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue, he became convinced that there

were more undead among the living than anyone had ever suspected,

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although their appetite for work had helped to hide their presence.

Whether there might be any labouring in the fields or in manufactories

he could not tell, but he suspect that an inability to lose consciousness

would be less an asset than it might seem in such repetitive

occupations. His judgment was that the great majority of the past’sundead must have worked as he had worked, not necessarily with a pen

in hand—and perhaps more likely with a paintbrush—but certainly in

the production of art...and probably in the production of modern art,

which sought to move the world into the future.

He was determined, though, that undeath should not make an

obsessive recluse of him. He cultivated the new friends forced upon him

by his poverty. He entered more fully into the Bohemia of those whose

pens and brushes were all that stood between themselves and penury:

those who wrote or painted for a living. With Ancelle as his guardian, hefound himself caught in a strange limbo between two worlds—an heir

without access to his fortune, a Tantalus whose hunger and thirst could

never be appeased—equally far from home in the Café Brasserie and the

salons, among those who counted their fortunes in sous and those who

reckoned in louis. He was not unwelcome in either milieu, and such

suspicion as he excited in both had little or nothing to do with having

left life behind without having fallen dead. In spite of his conviction that

the undead were far more likely to labour as artists than as

agriculturalists or wage-slaves, though, he never met another of his own

kind—not, at least, in person.

By 1855, it seemed to Charles, in retrospect, that the revolution of 1848

had not been the most important event of that year for him at all. It was

in 1848 that he had translated Edgar Poe’s “Mesmeric Revelation,”

although it was not until three years later that he realised the

importance of the role that Poe was to play in his career and his life,

and began to suspect that Poe too must have been undead for some

years before finally departing the world in that same crucial year of

1848. Even in 1851, translation still seemed a mere sideline within his work, but he came to understand then that if he were to be the writer

he wanted to be—the secret apostle of undeath—he need not, and

perhaps should not, restrict his efforts to the definitive volume of his

poetry that was still in gestation. If Poe had been a voice of undeath, as

seemed increasingly obvious, then he ought to do what he could to

assist in the transmission of that voice, by importing it into his own

language.

That too became part of his vocation, hampered but never stopped by

the progress of the disease that was making undeath as impossible forhim to endure as life had been.

13



4.The Phosphorescence of Putrescence: 1855-61

By 1855, those effects of undeath that had proved cumulative,

perceptible only with the passage of time, had revealed themselves in

full. Charles understood by then that he had lost the faculty of

forgetfulness along with the ability to sleep. His memory had become a

store from which nothing was any longer discarded.

At first, he thought that this must be an envious situation, especially for

a writer—but he realised soon enough that its advantages wereundermined by darker corollaries. He realised that just as the living

body is sculpted by death, so the active mind is sculpted by

forgetfulness. He realised that sleep—true, dreamless sleep—was no

mere absence of mental activity, but rather a process of release and

disposal. He realised that a mind that had lost the ability properly to

discriminate between dreams and wakefulness had also lost the ability

to reformulate and reorganise its memories. In the short term, that had

caused him, and would continue to cause him, no acute difficulty—but

in the longer term, it might, and probably would, engender a chaos of

superfluity.

The realization of what was happening to him had grown in Charles by

slow degrees, but by 1855 the evidence was irresistible. Jeanne, he saw

then, had contrived to overcome the difficulty by learning to forget

without going to sleep—but she had not been able to retain the

discrimination that sleep normally exercises. Her forgetfulness was

random, and it was powerful—except for the kind of unconscious

memory that her body had, which required no input from imagination.

She had become a creature of ingrained habit, with a layer of conscious

memory so thin and delicate as to be hardly more than a gloss. She

retained her language, well enough to memorise small theatrical parts,

but she hardly knew who she was, let alone what elaborate combination

of experiences had made her what she was. She could relate to other

people, well enough to be seductive, but her seductiveness had no

greater objective, no place in any plan for the future—and she was

forever restless, without knowing why. That was the price she had paid

for her immortality. That was how she had learned to live with the pox,

to carry it without being consumed by it

14



It was not a price that Charles could ever be prepared to pay. He was an

artist; memory was the core of his expertise. He had, therefore, to make

the most of his gift-cum-curse while he still could. He had to take the

tide of opportunity. He had to publish what he could, while he could,

even if Les fleurs du mal was not yet finished—and in spite of the gulf ofincomprehension that still separated him from a completer

understanding of his own state of being.

“My undeath,” he told his father’s ghost, “is no simpler an opposite of

your death than life was and is. The living are dying while they live, and

the transition to undeath does not banish death entirely from the body,

any more than it banishes sickness and disease. Undeath preserves—

indefinitely, I must suppose, if one can adapt oneself fully to its

requirements—but the immunity it confers is by no means absolute.

Such freedom from age and decay as undeath confers is not onlyconditional on the cultivation in consciousness of a new kind of

forgetfulness but on the cultivation in corporeality of a new kind of

robustness. Jeanne has that kind of physical obstinacy. Perhaps I might

train myself to it, if I wanted to, but my fate lies in another direction.

What I am trained to do by my own experience of life is to become more

and more conscious of the frailty of my flesh—not in the general sense

of which the living are always aware of their mortality, or the specific

sense in which the living feel particular aches and pains in response to

particular injuries and diseases—but in a new sense peculiar to the

state of undeath. I am becoming hyperconscious of my own inner decay:

of the creeping chaos afflicting my various bodily tissues and mental

capacities, under the dual pressure of mortal syphilis and fatal

insomnia.”

“If you do not have to die, my son,” his father’s ghost told him, bitterly,

“then I would advise you against it.”

“It is in the nature of the dead to envy the undead, even when they are

sick,” Charles told his father. “But I am free of that kind of envy now.

Syphilis is the one disease whose possession in metaphor could notrequire the sufferer to envy others their own sicknesses, because

syphilis is the great mimic among diseases. It is ubiquitous; there is no

symptom it cannot present, no ignominy it cannot contrive.”

“Perhaps,” his father insisted, “you might yet be able to cultivate the

faculty of forgetfulness without unconsciousness. Then, your flesh

would surely acquire the same fortitude as Jeanne Duval’s, without any

further effort.”

“I doubt it,” Charles relied. “At any rate, it hardly matters. No matter

how much I might resent the appalling profusion of my accumulating

15



memory, or the extent to which that profusion is shot through with

superfluity, I cannot do without it. Nor can I resist the ravages of death

and disease as they became similarly profuse and disordered—or even

the exaggerated consciousness of that increasing disorder.”

It was true, or so he firmly believed. There was only one thing he coulddo in response to his slowly-discovered predicament, and that was to

work. he worked as hard as he could, stealing poetic inspiration as and

when he could, and filling the remainder of his time with prose, original

and translated. When he could not work at all, he dulled his senses

with laudanum, even though it could not deliver him to

unconsciousness. All that it could do, at best, was to grant him a kind

of separation within himself, so that he seemed to exist on two planes at

the same time, drifting between the ethereal and the mundane as he

drifted between salon society and Bohemia.He published Les fleurs du mal in 1857, although it was not finished,

and was rendered even more incomplete by the censors, who demanded

that six poems be deleted. He published a new version in 1861,

although it was still not finished. In the meantime, he began work on a

second volume, which was to consist entirely of poetry in prose, and

would be called Spleen de Paris. When General Aupick died he went to

live with his mother at Honfleur for a while, fully intending to look after

her, but it proved impossible; no matter how strong his desire was, his

condition—physical, mental and spiritual—was no longer equal to thetask. He had to abandon her for her own good, as she had once

abandoned him for his.

His work suffered too, but not in the same way. He could write as never

before, but only briefly and with increasing trouble in the formulation.

Poetry increased in difficulty more rapidly than prose, and original

prose more rapidly than translation—but he could not have tolerated

the translation of any writer with whom he had a less manifest kinship

than Edgar Poe. Poe became his alter ego, communicating order and

discrimination when he could no longer find it in himself, calming himand giving him a focus that he needed as desperately as he desired it.

Year by year, the excess of memory corroded and corrupted his mind,

while versatile disease corroded and corrupted his flesh. He could no

longer have the least doubt that he would one day leave undeath behind

just as he had left life, faltering and groping to a far greater extent. He

felt further and further removed from the world of living men, more and

more alien to its habits and customs. He still went out to all his old

haunts, but he began to feel that he was indeed a haunter rather than a

participant in what went on there: a spectator who, while not yetdisembodied, was nevertheless not wholly present.

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Might he have felt the same had he still been alive? He could not tell for

certain, but he could not believe it. Had he been burdened by a mere

mélange of conventional poisons, he should have been able to enjoy the

bounty of forgetfulness and the grace of ordinary pain. As things were,

he remembered too much and felt too deeply. He could feel the disease working within his flesh, conducting an entire orchestra of petty

miseries, and he could not rid himself of the ceaseless mental pressure

of every vile nuance.

It was sublime, of course; it was beautiful too, in its fashion, but it was

excessive, and it became increasingly problematic for him to select out

moments and ideas for preservation and analysis in written form.

Charles could not have been free of Jeanne Duval even if she had not

come to see him to demand her petty tributes—but in truth, he would

not have wanted to be free of her. She was still his goddess, his creator,and if she was also his damnation, there was some cause for gratitude

even in that. Art, as he had assured Banvilla and Nadar, came from the

Devil as well as from God, and undeath had brought it forth in him

more extravagantly than life...if only for a little while.

“All those who find life unendurable are likely to find undeath no less

so,” he told Jeanne, when she came to visit him one day in 1861, “but

all those who find life woefully inadequate to feed their dreams will find

in the dread excess of undeath an immeasurable, if temporary,

exaltation. There are many kinds of people who would derive nothing

from a lamia’s kiss but catastrophe, but there are a few kinds, at least,

who might find it rewarding. I belong to one such kind, Jeanne, while

you belong to another, but there must be others who could find a means

therein to supply their own wild hunger. You must continue your quest,

Jeanne, when I am gone. You must not give up. You must learn to love

again, for ever and ever, and you must use your kisses wisely, however

sparingly.”

“I have no quest,” she told him, cruelly. “Nor wisdom, nor economy.”

The next time she came to see him she found him in a very poor state,

but she did not look at him with pity, and demanded her tribute

regardless. He gave her what he could—more grateful now than ever

before for the modesty of her needs and demands.

“I love you, Jeanne,” he said to her, as she made to leave. “I worship

you. I always have.”

“I’ve heard that before,” she told him, “more times than I remember.”

She seemed to be making light of the matter, and gave the impression

that she had no idea of the import of her words.

17



“You are an archetype of irony, as I am,” he told her, “but your undeath

really is incurable. Mine, alas, is not, although I have another disease,

which certainly is. Nature favours discreet diseases, which allow their

hosts abundant time to communicate the infection, and yours is very

discreet indeed. I hoped at first that mine might be as clever, in its own way, but it was too profligate and too impatient, and it will cauterise my

soul before the pox sends my flesh to its final ruination. Now, I hope for

a different kind of immortality.”

“You’re mad, Charles,” she told him, mildly. “You always were, but now it

has run away with you. Who will keep me when you’re gone? What will

become of me?”

“You’ll survive,” he assured her. “You might lack a worshipper, for a

while, but you’ll not lack lovers. In time...you’ll kiss another at least as

worthy as me. In time, you must.”

“Some might think my life disorderly,” she said, as she placed her hand

on the doorknob, “but it isn’t.”

“Mine is,” he told her, “but not entirely—and I am glad that I did not die

when I first repented its impossibility. I hardly knew what disorder was,

in those days. I do now.”

“Goodbye,” she said, as if it were forever—but that was the way she

always said goodbye.

“One day,” her victim told her, continuing even when she had closed the

door behind her, because it did not matter in the least whether she

could hear him or not, “a future Lavoisier will teach everyone in the

world the trick of leaving life behind without actually dying, and your

kind of poison will be mixed by apothecaries in their mortars for sale as

a tincture. One day, we shall all be able to toy with memory and

damnation, conscious of every movement of decay that moves within

our diseased flesh. Then, we shall see what can be made of undeath by

artists who can master every skill and conquer every thirst.”

Instead of saying goodbye, he reached for his pen. Jeanne Duval could

not understand him, any more than she could understand herself, but

Charles assured himself that there would come a day when everyone

could understand him, and would.

“There will come a day,” he said, to the smoke-fogged air in his dingy

room, as he set his nib to paper and began to scratch away at the

illimitable irritation that would not let him rest, “when you, my reader,

my hypocrite brother, will understand everything that I have recorded

here. There is a time to every purpose under heaven, and beyond the

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corrosions and corruptions of our petty envies and haphazard diseases,

you and I are of the same sad kind.”

He fell silent then, but his pen continued to scrape away, extending its

broken trail of scrupulously-stolen blood across the jaundiced page.

Documents

Brian Stableford - An Oasis of Horror